In the morning mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs beyond Kingsport. White and feathery
it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and caves
of leviathan. And later, in still summer rains on the steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter
bits of those dreams, that men shall not live without rumour of old, strange secrets, and wonders
that planets tell planets alone in the night. When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons,
and conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager
mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on the rocks see only a mystic whiteness,
as if the cliff’s rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolled
free in the aether of faery.Now north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace on
terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a grey frozen wind-cloud. Alone it is,
a bleak point jutting in limitless space, for there the coast turns sharp where the great Miskatonic
pours out of the plains past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint memories of
New England’s hills. The sea-folk in Kingsport look up at that cliff as other sea-folk
look up at the pole-star, and time the night’s watches by the way it hides or shews the
Great Bear, Cassiopeia, and the Dragon. Among them it is one with the firmament, and truly,
it is hidden from them when the mist hides the stars or the sun. Some of the cliffs they love,
as that whose grotesque profile they call Father Neptune, or that whose pillared steps they
term The Causeway; but this one they fear because it is so near the sky. The Portuguese sailors
coming in from a voyage cross themselves when they first see it, and the old Yankees believe
it would be much graver matter than death to climb it, if indeed that were possible. Nevertheless
there is an ancient house on that cliff, and at evening men see lights in the small-paned windows.The ancient house has always been there, and people say One dwells therein
who talks with the morning mists that come up from the deep, and perhaps sees singular things
oceanward at those times when the cliff’s rim becomes the rim of all earth, and solemn
buoys toll free in the white aether of faery. This they tell from hearsay, for that forbidding
crag is always unvisited, and natives dislike to train telescopes on it. Summer boarders have
indeed scanned it with jaunty binoculars, but have never seen more than the grey primeval roof,
peaked and shingled, whose eaves come nearly to the grey foundations, and the dim yellow light
of the little windows peeping out from under those eaves in the dusk. These summer people do
not believe that the same One has lived in the ancient house for hundreds of years, but cannot
prove their heresy to any real Kingsporter. Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulums
in bottles, buys groceries with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of
his antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the same when his grandfather
was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago, when Belcher or Shirley or Pownall
or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name was Thomas
Olney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay. With stout wife and
romping children he came, and his eyes were weary with seeing the same things for many years,
and thinking the same well-disciplined thoughts. He looked at the mists from the diadem of Father
Neptune, and tried to walk into their white world of mystery along the titan steps of The Causeway.
Morning after morning he would lie on the cliffs and look over the world’s rim at the
cryptical aether beyond, listening to spectral bells and the wild cries of what might have been
gulls. Then, when the mist would lift and the sea stand out prosy with the smoke of steamers,
he would sigh and descend to the town, where he loved to thread the narrow olden lanes up and
down hill, and study the crazy tottering gables and odd pillared doorways which had sheltered
so many generations of sturdy sea-folk. And he even talked with the Terrible Old Man, who was
not fond of strangers, and was invited into his fearsomely archaic cottage where low ceilings
and wormy panelling hear the echoes of disquieting soliloquies in the dark small hours.Of course it was inevitable that Olney should mark the grey unvisited cottage
in the sky, on that sinister northward crag which is one with the mists and the firmament. Always
over Kingsport it hung, and always its mystery sounded in whispers through Kingsport’s
crooked alleys. The Terrible Old Man wheezed a tale that his father had told him, of lightning
that shot one night up from that peaked cottage to the clouds of higher heaven; and Granny
Orne, whose tiny gambrel-roofed abode in Ship Street is all covered with moss and ivy, croaked
over something her grandmother had heard at second-hand, about shapes that flapped out of the
eastern mists straight into the narrow single door of that unreachable place—for the door
is set close to the edge of the crag toward the ocean, and glimpsed only from ships at sea.At length, being avid for new strange things and held back by neither the Kingsporter’s
fear nor the summer boarder’s usual indolence, Olney made a very terrible resolve. Despite
a conservative training—or because of it, for humdrum lives breed wistful longings of
the unknown—he swore a great oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and visit the abnormally
antique grey cottage in the sky. Very plausibly his saner self argued that the place must be
tenanted by people who reached it from inland along the easier ridge beside the Miskatonic’s
estuary. Probably they traded in Arkham, knowing how little Kingsport liked their habitation,
or perhaps being unable to climb down the cliff on the Kingsport side. Olney walked out along
the lesser cliffs to where the great crag leaped insolently up to consort with celestial things,
and became very sure that no human feet could mount it or descend it on that beetling southern
slope. East and north it rose thousands of feet vertically from the water, so only the western
side, inland and toward Arkham, remained.One early morning in August Olney set out to find a path to the inaccessible
pinnacle. He worked northwest along pleasant back roads, past Hooper’s Pond and the old
brick powder-house to where the pastures slope up to the ridge above the Miskatonic and give
a lovely vista of Arkham’s white Georgian steeples across leagues of river and meadow.
Here he found a shady road to Arkham, but no trail at all in the seaward direction he wished.
Woods and fields crowded up to the high bank of the river’s mouth, and bore not a sign
of man’s presence; not even a stone wall or a straying cow, but only the tall grass and
giant trees and tangles of briers that the first Indian might have seen. As he climbed slowly
east, higher and higher above the estuary on his left and nearer and nearer the sea, he found
the way growing in difficulty; till he wondered how ever the dwellers in that disliked place
managed to reach the world outside, and whether they came often to market in Arkham.Then the trees thinned, and far below him on his right he saw the hills and
antique roofs and spires of Kingsport. Even Central Hill was a dwarf from this height, and he
could just make out the ancient graveyard by the Congregational Hospital, beneath which rumour
said some terrible caves or burrows lurked. Ahead lay sparse grass and scrub blueberry bushes,
and beyond them the naked rock of the crag and the thin peak of the dreaded grey cottage. Now
the ridge narrowed, and Olney grew dizzy at his loneness in the sky. South of him the frightful
precipice above Kingsport, north of him the vertical drop of nearly a mile to the river’s
mouth. Suddenly a great chasm opened before him, ten feet deep, so that he had to let himself
down by his hands and drop to a slanting floor, and then crawl perilously up a natural defile
in the opposite wall. So this was the way the folk of the uncanny house journeyed betwixt earth
and sky!When he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he clearly
saw the lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as grey as the rock, and high peak standing
bold against the milky white of the seaward vapours. And he perceived that there was no door
on this landward end, but only a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull’s-eye
panes leaded in seventeenth-century fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos, and he could
see nothing below but the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone in the sky with this
queer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled around to the front and saw that the wall
stood flush with the cliff’s edge, so that the single narrow door was not to be reached
save from the empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude could not wholly explain.
And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive, or bricks so crumbled still form
a standing chimney.As the mist thickened, Olney crept around to the windows on the north and west
and south sides, trying them but finding them all locked. He was vaguely glad they were locked,
because the more he saw of that house the less he wished to get in. Then a sound halted him.
He heard a lock rattle and bolt shoot, and a long creaking follow as if a heavy door were slowly
and cautiously opened. This was on the oceanward side that he could not see, where the narrow
portal opened on blank space thousands of feet in the misty sky above the waves.Then there was heavy, deliberate tramping in the cottage, and Olney heard the
windows opening, first on the north side opposite him, and then on the west just around the
corner. Next would come the south windows, under the great low eaves on the side where he stood;
and it must be said that he was more than uncomfortable as he thought of the detestable house
on one side and the vacancy of upper air on the other. When a fumbling came in the nearer casements
he crept around to the west again, flattening himself against the wall beside the now opened
windows. It was plain that the owner had come home; but he had not come from the land, nor from
any balloon or airship that could be imagined. Steps sounded again, and Olney edged round to
the north; but before he could find a haven a voice called softly, and he knew he must confront
his host.Stuck out of a west window was a great black-bearded face whose eyes shone
phosphorescently with the imprint of unheard-of sights. But the voice was gentle, and of a quaint
olden kind, so that Olney did not shudder when a brown hand reached out to help him over the
sill and into that low room of black oak wainscots and carved Tudor furnishings. The man was
clad in very ancient garments, and had about him an unplaceable nimbus of sea-lore and dreams
of tall galleons. Olney does not recall many of the wonders he told, or even who he was; but
says that he was strange and kindly, and filled with the magic of unfathomed voids of time and
space. The small room seemed green with a dim aqueous light, and Olney saw that the far windows
to the east were not open, but shut against the misty aether with dull thick panes like the
bottoms of old bottles.That bearded host seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the elder
mysteries; and from the tales of marvellous ancient things he related, it must be guessed that
the village folk were right in saying he had communed with the mists of the sea and the clouds
of the sky ever since there was any village to watch his taciturn dwelling from the plain below.
And the day wore on, and still Olney listened to rumours of old times and far places, and heard
how the Kings of Atlantis fought with the slippery blasphemies that wriggled out of rifts in
ocean’s floor, and how the pillared and weedy temple of Poseidonis is still glimpsed at
midnight by lost ships, who know by its sight that they are lost. Years of the Titans were recalled,
but the host grew timid when he spoke of the dim first age of chaos before the gods or even
the Elder Ones were born, and when only the other gods came to dance on the peak of Hatheg-Kla
in the stony desert near Ulthar, beyond the river Skai.It was at this point that there came a knocking on the door; that ancient door
of nail-studded oak beyond which lay only the abyss of white cloud. Olney started in fright,
but the bearded man motioned him to be still, and tiptoed to the door to look out through a
very small peep-hole. What he saw he did not like, so pressed his fingers to his lips and tiptoed
around to shut and lock all the windows before returning to the ancient settle beside his guest.
Then Olney saw lingering against the translucent squares of each of the little dim windows in
succession a queer black outline as the caller moved inquisitively about before leaving; and
he was glad his host had not answered the knocking. For there are strange objects in the great
abyss, and the seeker of dreams must take care not to stir up or meet the wrong ones.Then the shadows began to gather; first little furtive ones under the table,
and then bolder ones in the dark panelled corners. And the bearded man made enigmatical gestures
of prayer, and lit tall candles in curiously wrought brass candlesticks. Frequently he would
glance at the door as if he expected someone, and at length his glance seemed answered by a
singular rapping which must have followed some very ancient and secret code. This time he did
not even glance through the peep-hole, but swung the great oak bar and shot the bolt, unlatching
the heavy door and flinging it wide to the stars and the mist.And then to the sound of obscure harmonies there floated into that room from
the deep all the dreams and memories of earth’s sunken Mighty Ones. And golden flames
played about weedy locks, so that Olney was dazzled as he did them homage. Trident-bearing Neptune
was there, and sportive tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins’ backs was balanced
a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great
Abyss. And the conches of the tritons gave weird blasts, and the nereids made strange sounds
by striking on the grotesque resonant shells of unknown lurkers in black sea-caves. Then hoary
Nodens reached forth a wizened hand and helped Olney and his host into the vast shell, whereat
the conches and the gongs set up a wild and awesome clamour. And out into the limitless aether
reeled that fabulous train, the noise of whose shouting was lost in the echoes of thunder.All night in Kingsport they watched that lofty cliff when the storm and the
mists gave them glimpses of it, and when toward the small hours the little dim windows went
dark they whispered of dread and disaster. And Olney’s children and stout wife prayed
to the bland proper god of Baptists, and hoped that the traveller would borrow an umbrella and
rubbers unless the rain stopped by morning. Then dawn swam dripping and mist-wreathed out of
the sea, and the buoys tolled solemn in vortices of white aether. And at noon elfin horns rang
over the ocean as Olney, dry and light-footed, climbed down from the cliffs to antique Kingsport
with the look of far places in his eyes. He could not recall what he had dreamed in the sky-perched
hut of that still nameless hermit, or say how he had crept down that crag untraversed by other
feet. Nor could he talk of these matters at all save with the Terrible Old Man, who afterward
mumbled queer things in his long white beard; vowing that the man who came down from that crag
was not wholly the man who went up, and that somewhere under that grey peaked roof, or amidst
inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still the lost spirit of him
who was Thomas Olney.And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and weariness,
the philosopher has laboured and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds of
a citizen. Not any more does he long for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that
peer like green reefs from a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow,
and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination. His good wife waxes stouter
and his children older and prosier and more useful, and he never fails to smile correctly with
pride when the occasion calls for it. In his glance there is not any restless light, and if
he ever listens for solemn bells or far elfin horns it is only at night when old dreams are
wandering. He has never seen Kingsport again, for his family disliked the funny old houses,
and complained that the drains were impossibly bad. They have a trim bungalow now at Bristol
Highlands, where no tall crags tower, and the neighbours are urban and modern.But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man admits
a thing untold by his grandfather. For now, when the wind sweeps boisterous out of the north
past the high ancient house that is one with the firmament, there is broken at last that ominous
brooding silence ever before the bane of Kingsport’s maritime cotters. And old folk tell
of pleasing voices heard singing there, and of laughter that swells with joys beyond earth’s
joys; and say that at evening the little low windows are brighter than formerly. They say, too,
that the fierce aurora comes oftener to that spot, shining blue in the north with visions of
frozen worlds while the crag and the cottage hang black and fantastic against wild coruscations.
And the mists of the dawn are thicker, and sailors are not quite so sure that all the muffled
seaward ringing is that of the solemn buoys.Worst of all, though, is the shrivelling of old fears in the hearts of Kingsport’s
young men, who grow prone to listen at night to the north wind’s faint distant sounds.
They swear no harm or pain can inhabit that high peaked cottage, for in the new voices gladness
beats, and with them the tinkle of laughter and music. What tales the sea-mists may bring to
that haunted and northernmost pinnacle they do not know, but they long to extract some hint
of the wonders that knock at the cliff-yawning door when clouds are thickest. And patriarchs
dread lest some day one by one they seek out that inaccessible peak in the sky, and learn what
centuried secrets hide beneath the steep shingled roof which is part of the rocks and the stars
and the ancient fears of Kingsport. That those venturesome youths will come back they do not
doubt, but they think a light may be gone from their eyes, and a will from their hearts. And
they do not wish quaint Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic gables to drag listless
down the years while voice by voice the laughing chorus grows stronger and wilder in that unknown
and terrible eyrie where mists and the dreams of mists stop to rest on their way from the sea
to the skies.They do not wish the souls of their young men to leave the pleasant hearths
and gambrel-roofed taverns of old Kingsport, nor do they wish the laughter and song in that
high rocky place to grow louder. For as the voice which has come has brought fresh mists from
the sea and from the north fresh lights, so do they say that still other voices will bring more
mists and more lights, till perhaps the olden gods (whose existence they hint only in whispers
for fear the Congregational parson shall hear) may come out of the deep and from unknown Kadath
in the cold waste and make their dwelling on that evilly appropriate crag so close to the gentle
hills and valleys of quiet simple fisherfolk. This they do not wish, for to plain people things
not of earth are unwelcome; and besides, the Terrible Old Man often recalls what Olney said
about a knock that the lone dweller feared, and a shape seen black and inquisitive against the
mist through those queer translucent windows of leaded bull’s-eyes.All these things, however, the Elder Ones only may decide; and meanwhile the
morning mist still comes up by that lonely vertiginous peak with the steep ancient house, that
grey low-eaved house where none is seen but where evening brings furtive lights while the north
wind tells of strange revels. White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the
clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And when tales fly thick in
the grottoes of tritons, and conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder
Ones, then great eager vapours flock to heaven laden with lore; and Kingsport, nestling uneasy
on its lesser cliffs below that awesome hanging sentinel of rock, sees oceanward only a mystic
whiteness, as if the cliff’s rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of the
buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.